The Fantasy Of Missile Defense In Ukraine

December 22, 2023

In October 2022 I mocked western media propaganda that was depicting Russia as unable to sustain the war:

Russia, Having 'Run Out Of Missiles', Launches Barrage On Ukraine

Back in March I had warned that Lies Do Not Win Wars. Here is another practical example.

After allegedly having 'run out of missiles' and, more importantly, patience, the leadership of the Russian Federation decided to de-electrify Ukrainian cities with a 'barrage of missile strikes'.

But first came the propaganda blubber: …

There followed 25 headlines by western media which claimed that Russia was running out of missiles.

More recently we see frequent claims by the Ukrainian government that it shot down 43 of the 32 drones Russia launched that day as well as 5 out of 3 supersonic missiles.

Laughable nonsense.

But slowly, slowly the Ukrainians and media have turned to describing stuff more near to, but not yet, reality:

Russia has fired 7,400 missiles, 3,700 Shahed drones in war so far, Kyiv says – Reuters

Russia has launched about 7,400 missiles and 3,700 Shahed attack drones at targets in Ukraine during its 22-month-old invasion, Kyiv said on Thursday, illustrating the vast scale of Moscow's aerial assaults.

Ukrainian air defences were able to shoot down 1,600 of the missiles and 2,900 of the drones, air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said in televised comments. "We are faced with an enormous aggressor, and we are fighting back," he said.

Shooting down drones, which are relatively slow and fly low, is not so difficult or expensive. One often only needs to have some machine guns in place on the path along which a drone is flying.

Shooting down missiles is something entirely different. Due to their flightpath and speed one needs expensive missile defense systems. The anti-missile missiles these systems fire come at a high price. One Patriot missile comes at about $2,000,000, more for newer ones. Routinely two are fired against any potential target.

If the Ukraine has really shot down 1,600 missiles, which I very much doubt, one can easily calculate the enormous costs of such an endeavor

There are reasons why Patriot missiles are only produced in the hundreds per year, not in the thousands.

No country in the world can sustain such an onslaught without running out of defenses or going bankrupt.

Several months ago a U.S. delivered Patriot system in Kiev came under attack. Set to automatic mode it fired (video) 32 missiles for no observable hits on the imaginary targets. Scott Ritter has said that the U.S. Marines are not allowed to use the automatic mode of their Patriot systems because that is known to fail. But the Ukrainians were not trained to fully handle the manual mode.

And now they are telling us that they shot down 1,600 missiles?

How probable is that?

Posted by b on December 22, 2023 at 12:53 UTC | Permalink

Comments

“The Russians are not interested in territory ! (oh year ? And why are the Slavyangrad reports so focussed on capturing strongholds and entering into villages ?)”
Slavyangrad focuses on territories and strongholds because that’s what idiots always focus on, his readers are mostly idiots and he panders to these mostly idiot readers.
Attrition is the only strategy that guarantees permanent victory in a war like this. Ukrainians have to be beaten until they are thoroughly sick of war and submit to Russia’s conditions. If you look at credible opinion polls taken recently in Ukraine, we are far from that point. Grabbing territory is only important if it serves the aim of attrition. No doubt there is plenty of incompetence in Russian military, same as in Russian military in WW2, but logic of attrition guarantees certain and devastating eventual victory.
In addition to attriting Ukraine (military and public opinion), Russia has to attrit NATO. Like Ukraine, NATO still has way too much fighting ability and fighting spirit for comfort. The slower Russia goes, the less danger of arousing the NATO+PacificRim sleeping giant, the greater the pressure on USA to get out of Ukraine so as to focus on Middle East and China.
According to a quick Bing search, 59259 people died in that earthquake in Turkey earlier this year, which is comparable to the human cost of this war to Russia, since that 59259 included irreplaceable young women and girl, whereas the men Russia is losing are easily replaced in 20 years by a new crop of cannon fodder. It’s a tragedy for the individual men who die or are maimed, but a statistical blip got Russia as a whole. As for Ukraine, emigration and birthrate effects swamp manpower losses from war itself.

Posted by: anonposter | Dec 23 2023 15:36 utc | 201

187 – Speculation about who Stalin would have had executed is pointless. Vlasov, for example, survived the late 1930s purges and they may even have helped his military career. Certainly vacancies were created.
Posted by: Waldorf | Dec 23 2023 10:45 utc | 193

Do you have any idea what people were purged for back in the days?
There is absolutely zero doubt Putin would be in the basement of Lubyanka and then in an unmarked grave the next day after a hypothetical modern Stalin took power.
The unforgivable infractions are too many to list, but here are a few of the key accusations I would expect to be raised:
1) Treason, for presiding over an oligarchic neoliberal resource-export deindustrializing economy for decades and handing over trillions in real wealth to the enemy for peanuts in return
2) Killing millions of Russians through continuing the destruction of the old Soviet healthcare and social security systems
3) Killing a million and a half Russians by refusing to contain COVID in order to not upset the oligarchs (who he would have had to tax hard in order to fund a proper such effort) while secluding himself for two years in his bunker (i.e. he knew very well what the danger is).
4) There would be dozens counts of treason, for being chummy with the West all this time, signing Minsk-1 and Minsk-2, the terms of the proposed Istanbul agreement, and everything else that went on all these years.
Remember that back in the days people were sent to the GULAG for the slightest suspicion of not being loyal, which could arise even from things like spending too much time with Western diplomats in Moscow.
5) Treason for tacitly supporting the rise of Banderites in Ukraine for so many years and parallel analogous developments in many of the former USSR republics.
6) Another act of treason would be collusion with Yeltsin and his cronies, whom he never touched once he got in power (that was in fact the rather explicit deal). A modern Stalin would of course seek revenge towards the Yeltsin clique and everyone associated with it.
Again, there’s plenty more, but this is a good start.

Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Dec 23 2023 19:57 utc | 202

Posted by: alek_a | Dec 23 2023 13:16 utc | 200
Brave Sir Shadowbanned is a one-note poster. Russia’s always losing in his world, the war should have been over long ago, Putin is a criminal, too many pointless deaths. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
He can’t see the forest for the tree, and revels in Western propaganda.
With all the copious amounts of free time he has to post, and given his intimate knowledge of military and strategic affairs, not to mention his absolute “loyalty” to Russia, you’d think he’d want to volunteer his services to the MoD. But maybe he’s too busy…criticizing.

Posted by: James M. | Dec 23 2023 22:35 utc | 203

Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Dec 23 2023 19:57 utc | 202
You are an idiot thinking that Covid killed millions of people. You probably got 5 boosters.

Posted by: RB | Dec 24 2023 8:06 utc | 204

You are an idiot thinking that Covid killed millions of people. You probably got 5 boosters.
Posted by: RB | Dec 24 2023 8:06 utc | 204

In Russia the official count is 400K, but the health ministry openly acknowledged that this is a serious undercount because of a combination of lack of testing and deliberate data faking (in large part by themselves).
The excess mortality is around a million and a half. It is a million and a half in the US too, but the US has more than double the population.
Overall worldwide it is approaching 30 million now. Would have been about double that without vaccines, but in the long run those 30M saved will be a rounding error to the total death toll as people get endlessly reinfected (unless there is a global awakening among the masses, physical extermination of the ruling classes, and refounding of society on the basis of the common god always taking precedence, part of which would be eradication of SARS-CoV-2; but good luck putting that program to practice in the world we live in — the masses consist mostly of brainwashed morons who will never understand their own long-term self-interest, evidence for which you just presented yourself).
Russia was among the hardest hit places. It was a total catastrophe there (and Belarus too, where Lukashenko refused to even acknowledge that there is a problem), and so it was in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe where vaccination rates were very low so the impact wasn’t cushioned the way it was in the West, as weak as the vaccines were.
So go figure how well Putin did.
In fact the weak response to COVID presaged the indecisive handling of the war. It could have been used to organize and discipline society into a coherent unit, which would have better prepared for war too, but no, neoliberalism was the religion and preserving oligarch wealth was the most precious value to uphold.

Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Dec 24 2023 14:34 utc | 205

Posted by: shаdοwbanned | Dec 24 2023 14:34 utc | 205
The lies of those comments merit a reply. Here it is.
In Russia the official count is 400K, but the health ministry openly acknowledged that this is a serious undercount because of a combination of lack of testing and deliberate data faking (in large part by themselves).
No source of course and the real figure for Russia is today 388.478.
Source:
https://coronavirus.politologue.com/
In every country the “official counts” have always been overestimated. People dying from cancer and coronavirus are counted as coronavirus. Same with a lot of different diseases.
The excess mortality is around a million and a half. It is a million and a half in the US too, but the US has more than double the population.
No source given. Propaganda bullshit as usual.
“Overall worldwide it is approaching 30 million now.
Not even 7 million worldwide. Including all overestimations.
Would have been about double that without vaccines, but in the long run those 30M saved will be a rounding error to the total death toll as people get endlessly reinfected (unless there is a global awakening among the masses, physical extermination of the ruling classes, and refounding of society on the basis of the common god always taking precedence, part of which would be eradication of SARS-CoV-2;
The so called “vaccines” are not vaccines. Not only they do not hinder the transmission of the virus, but injected people have more symptoms and for a longer time than those without injection, even with the omicron variant which is innocuous. The spike protein is a toxin which links with the ACE2 enzyme. This enzyme regulates downward the blood pressure. Go figure what is happening when one gets that spike protein. Moreover it was quite recently found that the mRNA so that it will last longer inside the body had its uridine molecules replaced by pseudo-pseudo-uridine molecules (300 in one mARN) which causes misreadings while the protein is built through the ribosome. Now guess why the spike protein was not used alone as a “vaccine” although it exists since December 2021.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/EPAR/nuvaxovid
And no people do not get continuously reinfected as the antibodies built after a first infection will not only target the spike protein which mutates quickly, but also the envelop proteins which mutate not so quickly.
In France, there were more deaths in 2022 with the injections than in 2020 when no injection existed. In 2021, the difference with 2020 was only 7,300 when a year with an over-mortality should be followed with a year with an under-mortality.
Here are the data for France compared to 2019:
2020: +55,700
2021: +48,400
2022: +61,800
Conclusion: with the injections there were more deaths than with the virus alone.
Source:
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/7628176
but good luck putting that program to practice in the world we live in — the masses consist mostly of brainwashed morons who will never understand their own long-term self-interest, evidence for which you just presented yourself).
It is the one who says it, who he is.
Russia was among the hardest hit places. It was a total catastrophe there (and Belarus too, where Lukashenko refused to even acknowledge that there is a problem), and so it was in Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe where vaccination rates were very low so the impact wasn’t cushioned the way it was in the West, as weak as the vaccines were.
No argument. No data. Just ranting.
So go figure how well Putin did.
Superhero Putin is responsible for everything. Of course.
As a reminder: injections were not mandatory and many people refused to be injected because the knew that it was a begnin disease. The fact is that in 2020 in France and in Switzerland for instance there was no excess mortality under the age of 70 yo. Only people with a health problem were at risk.
In fact the weak response to COVID presaged the indecisive handling of the war. It could have been used to organize and discipline society into a coherent unit, which would have better prepared for war too, but no, neoliberalism was the religion and preserving oligarch wealth was the most precious value to uphold.
Pure rant again by an enemy of Russia. As for disciplining the society, yes, it was done in Ukraine and we could see the results. Also it is underway thanks to the coronavirus (a bioweapon…) in several western countries.

Posted by: Naive | Dec 24 2023 18:24 utc | 206

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